Trent McConaghy

Ascribe – The Internet of Ownership

The idea of using the Bitcoin blockchain to represent and track the ownership of off-chain assets is almost as old as Bitcoin itself. One of the startups that is pursuing this vision is Berlin-based Ascribe, which allows creators to register (‘ascribe’), transfer and archive digital art.

Ascribe CTO joined us for a fascinating discussion of their ambitious goals to enable a so-far elusive secondary market for digital art, help creators monetize their work and ultimately retrofit an entire ownership layer to the internet.

Topics we discussed in this episode

Why ownership in the internet is broken

How Ascribe wants to realize the vision of Project Xanadu of an internet with bi-directional links and baked-in copyrights

How the SPOOL (Secure Public Online Ownership Ledger) protocol works

The components of the Ascribe tech stack

How Ascribe will crawl and similarity-match the entire internet to retrofit an internet of ownership